vol252 4 IASSIST Quarterly Summer 2001 At the IASSIST/IFDO conference in Amsterdam in May of 2001 a session on “New Archives (Forum)” was chaired by Paul de Guchteneire (UNESCO) and Brigitte Hausstein (GESIS) with participants from new and emerging archives as well as some from the “old world” of existing data archives. The chairs of the session have succeeded in publishing the collection of papers. The reason for re-publishing the session in the IASSIST Quarterly is to spread the word about the archive movement in Eastern Europe to a broader audience of the full IASSIST membership and IQ readers. In this brief introduction I will take the opportunity to thank the chairpersons and editors Brigitte Hausstein and Paul de Guchteneire for their effort and also to thank the authors from several countries in the Eastern Europe. For a more detailed introduction to the papers you may refer to the introduction by the chairpersons. Karsten Boye Rasmussen - March 2002 Editor's Notes Introduction Editors: Brigitte Hausstein, GESIS Branch Office Berlin/ Central Archive Cologne and Paul de Guchteneire, UNESCO/MOST, Paris. The “New Archives Forum” at the 2001 IASSIST/IFDO Conference “A Data Odyssey – Collaborative working in the Social Science Cyberspace” The International Association for Social Science Informa- tion Services and Technology (IASSIST) held its 27th annual conference with the International Federation of Data Organizations (IFDO) from May 14 - 19, 2001. The conference was convened in Amsterdam and hosted by the NIWI (Nederlands Instituut voor Wetenschappelijke Informatiediensten - Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services) and the Scientific Statistical Agency of the Netherlands. During the last quarter of the 20th Century, IASSIST has held its annual international confer- ence in Europe about every four years. IASSIST did so again, this year in Amsterdam in collaboration with IFDO. About 200 data and archive specialists from the USA, Canada, Eastern and Western Europe as well as from Africa and Asia attended the conference. The conference was structured in three different domains of potential sharing of information, experience and expertise: First were organizational matters, like acquisition policy, access to data, and setting up new national or topical archives. Second was meta data: standards, tools, and new develop- ments. And third was content: various (new) data types like qualitative, aggregate data, multi-media or geo-data, or combining data from registries. The pre-conference workshops which are a tradition at IASSIST/IFDO confer- ences, introduced the participants to the a new standard for meta data documentation – the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). The most often discussed issue at the conference centered also on the DDI and special attention has been devoted to the applications of the DDI and to the experiences in the data archives. IASSIST conferences also bring together colleagues from new data archives around the world. In Amsterdam a special session for these new archives was organized for the first time. The main focus of the session was on Data Archives in Eastern Europe but also representatives of new archives from Japan, Finland, Ireland and Greece joined the meeting. The session chaired by Paul de Guchteneire UNESCO/MOST (Management of Social Transformations Program), Paris and Brigitte Hausstein GESIS (German Social Science Infrastructure Services) Branch Office Berlin/Central Archive Cologne comprised two case studies from Slovenia and South Africa and a Forum of representa- tives of data archives from Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Russia and Romania.